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Yesterday was supposed to be the day that we announced a public beta version of the CoSchedule calendar, but sadly, it didn’t work out that way. We missed our deadline, but I don’t quite consider it a failure.

It wasn’t that we didn’t try. The entire Todaymade team was plugged in this weekend to do some final testing and preparation for a soft launch on Monday. At the end of the day, however, we just didn’t feel like it was ready for the wild. We decided to hold off for another week or two.

Basically, we wouldn’t use it on our own blog in its current state, so we don’t think you should use it on yours. At least not yet. Never fear, however. We are SO close–about 90% of the way there!

Getting The Basics Right

It all comes down to the basic abilities that CoSchedule must do better than anyone else. We’ve identified four of them:

Automated Social Publishing

WordPress Plugin

Drag & Drop Editorial Calendar

Team Communication

So far, from this list, we’ve solved and tested number one and two with much success. The third is one of the largest components, and is proving to be a bit trickier. As we see it, there are only two types of calendars: The kind that works like Google Calendar, and the kind that doesn’t.

We want to be the Google Calendar kind. Rock solid, real-time, and without fail. We won’t settle for anything less, because we believe that this is really what the editorial scheduling market needs. Am I right, or am I right?

CoSchedule must also be “one of the good ones” when it comes to WordPress integration. WordPress users know that there are endless plugins available. Some are great, some are so-so, and quite a few are absolute junk. We plan to be one of the reliable kind that “just works.”

There will be delays along the way, but eventually CoSchedule will be:

Real-time

Fast

Reliable

Fun To Use

We won’t ship until it meets the criteria we’ve outlined here, and I like to think we’ve proved that by holding off on this beta release. It hurt to put a pause on the release, especially after our team killed itself working hard the week before. We are pretty committed to quality, though, and this time around that meant holding off on the calendar beta release just a bit longer.

In the meantime, we quietly released a new beta version of our WordPress plugin yesterday. This was updated “automagically” for you beta testers, with no install necessary. This version fixes several bugs that cropped up in WordPress 3.5.2, specifically the new version of the JetPack plugin. This release also includes a few of the foundational changes that we needed to make in order to make the calendar a reality.

So, look forward to that, and keep your eyes open for a video preview of the calendar in action later this week.

In the mean time, thank you for keeping your eye on CoSchedule! We don’t take it for granted.

I would like to congradulate you on your honest and open approach on this project. It is refreshing and very few companies or business would openly discuss their projects as freely as coshedule. Especially when thing do not go as planned.

I look forward to the beta release and being able to use all the features.